Digital video recording devices have become increasingly commonplace and can now be found in a broad range of consumer electronic devices, including cellular telephones, smartphones, digital cameras, and automobiles. Video recording devices also comprise a fundamental component of many surveillance and security systems, which due to their rapidly diminishing size have become ubiquitous in both public and private applications. It has also become routine for professional and amateur production artists to make their video content available through online media outlets. Complementing these trends, network infrastructure and computing devices have become increasingly capable of transmitting, processing, and displaying video content, including high definition video content. As a result, the amount of digital video content available to consumers has grown—and continues to grow—exponentially. Much of this content is stored and transmitted in a compressed format to reduce storage and bandwidth requirements. To leverage this massive amount of digital video content, a wide range of automated techniques for processing and analyzing such content have been developed. One class of such techniques relates to object tracking. In particular, object tracking techniques allow movement of a recorded object to be automatically detected and analyzed. Among other advantages, object tracking techniques enable computer systems to identify and follow moving objects in video content on an automated basis, thereby eliminating the need for active human viewing and/or monitoring in many applications.